Americans Abroad No. 5
The author tries to appear fearless on the Pont du Gard ©1987 UrbisMedia
Typically, after a foreign tour arrives back on home soil a tour leader does not hear again from all but a small fraction of his tour members. This is true of the “friendships” that one forms on a tour, and especially of those with whom relations have been somewhat difficult. So, when I heard from Rosalyn, several months after our return, I was surprised. It was an announcement of her impending marriage to her fiancé who had been unable to join the tour because he had to remain at home to care for his collection of iguanas and snakes.
The announcement evoked vivid memories of Rosalyn, especially of the trip the tour made to the Pont du Gard in southern France. I recalled being both flattered and puzzled by the rapt attention my little group of gave my lecturette on the wonders of Roman engineering. They seemed so fascinated with my recitation of how the marvelous 2000-year-old aqueduct over the Gard River in southern France was so masterfully engineered that it could carry water smoothly and efficiently from the springs at Uzes to Nîmes, some fifty kilometres away. Calcification on the sides of the water channel provides evidence that it was in operation for 400 to 500 years. Some of the students were wide-eyed, others gape-mouthed.
Since my back was to the aqueduct I had no idea that it wasn’t my recitation of the feats of Roman engineering that was producing astonishment. Not until someone exclaimed, “Oh my God! She’s going to get herself killed!”
I turned to see Rosalyn, perched precariously about fifty meters out on the top of the aqueduct, where there were no railings, no walls, nothing at all to prevent a gust of wind from sweeping her off to a 300 foot plunge to certain death in the river bed below.
There she stood—as well as Rosalyn could stand—for she had a disability that affected her leg and her balance, trying to change lenses on her camera. The wind blew her hair almost horizontal, and she kept shifting her feet for better purchase on the pitted and uneven pavers that surfaced the top of the aqueduct. It had all of the grim expectancy of watching someone who might at any moment jump to death from a building, but with greater probability.
I wasn’t particularly anxious to stroll out on the aqueduct to retrieve Rosalyn. Lifeguards are sometime pulled under by the people they are saving from drowning, and Rosalyn just might engage me in the high altitude equivalent. With that sense of foreboding I ventured out toward her.
“Hi,” she said as I approached, as though we were meeting on some street corner, “I’m getting some really great shots from up here.”
“Great, I’ll send them to your next of kin. Now let’s get the hell back on terra firma before your last shot is of a rapidly approaching river.”
This was not my first occasion to have to instruct Rosalyn that I would prefer not to have to ship her body back home in a plastic bag. A couple of weeks earlier, in London, her roommate of two nights had awakened in the middle of the night to find Rosalyn engaged in sexual calisthenics with a strange guy she had picked up in a bar earlier that evening. After I found her very concerned room mate different accommodations I told her the story of Jack the Ripper, omitting none of the gory details.
But it was soon evident Rosalyn’s risk-taking quotient was just about off the chart. Having survived being sliced into sushi by her pick-up guy, and making it safely back off the Pont du Gard, and undaunted by her disability, her betrothal to some gullible jerk tending iguanas and boa constrictors back in San Bernardino, or good sense, she and another young lady she met on the tour later decided to have some drinks and laughs with Turkish border guards. Turkish Border Guards!!! Wait, let me say that again: Turkish Border Guards!!! And behind the closed doors of the border station. They had elected to do a sequel to Midnight Express while the rest of us admired the antiquities at the ruins of ancient Ephesus. If the ship hadn’t sent a tender back to port because they were not on board at sailing time, they might still be in some seraglio for the comfort of Turkish Border Guards!!!
Once safely back aboard Rosalyn and her fellow border guard entertainer, both, although it is of no significance other than coincidence, elementary school teachers, proceeded to for the last few days of the cruise to open the offices of Venus to patronage of members of the ship’s crew and custodial staff. It was reported to me that at one time there were as many as three crew vacuuming the carpets in the companionway near their cabin so as not to appear forming a queue.
Had I known what I was in for because of Rosalyn’s insatiable libido I might have considered giving her a little nudge toward the edge as I escorted her from the top of the Pont du Gard. I would have admired her for her overcoming of her physical adversities if she hadn’t been so ready to add a variety of venereal diseases and possible mutilations to her afflictions. What she was doing is no worse than the “stag” antics that many guys go through before getting married, but Rosalyn’s libido was inversely proportionate to her discretion.
On the last night of the tour I was forced once again to arrange another room for her second roommate who discovered Rosalyn and the hotel’s bartender doing some “synchronized swimming” in the bathtub of their room. I’m not sure how she managed the long flight home; my seat was in another cabin. All I know is that guy she’s marrying has something a lot wilder on his hands than iguanas and boa constrictors.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.26.2005)